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This week Simon Taylor & Cuy Sheffield are joined by:

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Stablecoin-linked cards now hide different financial architectures beneath the same checkout experience. MoneyGram’s Luke Tuttle offered the right test:

The test is whether stablecoins change the issuing, treasury or settlement stack, or simply sit beside the existing card program. Rain’s Charles Yoo-Naut said card programs can look similar on the surface, but spending stablecoins solves one use case, while Rain rebuilds more of the issuing stack around onchain money. Luke framed the same split as whether the card sits on the side or is built into the existing product. Marqeta's partnership with zerohash is the integration-layer version. It lets any Marqeta card program add stablecoin spending without rebuilding. zerohash supplies the regulated digital-asset layer, while Marqeta remains the card-program and processing layer. Marqeta processed more than $380 billion in 2025 and sits inside programs run by Block, Klarna, Affirm and Ramp, so the distribution is real.

Cuy Sheffield read the logic from both sides. Card enablers hold programs that lack digital-asset infrastructure; stablecoin providers hold customers who want cards.

The announcement does not name a launch customer. Marqeta’s installed base gives the partnership immediate distribution, but adoption will depend on how many existing programs activate the capability.

Funding a card with stablecoins adds a spend source. It does not touch the plumbing behind the transaction. The line that matters runs through settlement, and that is where Rain sits apart.

Rain is a principal member of both Visa and Mastercard, its own program manager, and processor-agnostic. Charles called that combination unusual, and it is what lets Rain settle with Visa seven days a week, which he said is only possible on a blockchain. Stablecoin funding gives a program a new source of card spend. Stablecoin settlement changes its liquidity and working-capital mechanics.

Luke named the constraint that decides how far any program can go. A sponsor bank supplies necessary infrastructure and also holds an opinion on your customers, countries and compliance perimeter. Simon followed it to the conclusion that a polished self-custodial experience still stops where the sponsor bank's risk appetite stops. Rain's advantage is control over more of the issuing stack. Principal membership gives it greater influence over program economics and risk appetite than a model dependent on a sponsor bank.

MoneyGram shows what native looks like inside a company already moving money at scale. When it integrated Fireblocks, Tuttle set one rule:

Stablecoins, fiat and bank accounts had to live in the same cash-management system, visible in a single view of the company's cash position. Not a separate report, not a side spreadsheet, not another department.

The routing decision then becomes economic rather than ideological. The mature implementation gives treasury one control plane across bank accounts, fiat and stablecoins, then routes by cost, availability and settlement speed.

That architecture also expands what MoneyGram can sell. Remittance firms historically did not treat the receiver as a customer, because standing up a balance product for beneficiaries across 200 countries meant a sponsor bank and a licensing stack in each one. A reusable wallet stack lowers that cost, and the card is the product the receiver already understands. The same architecture could lower the cost of treating remittance receivers as customers across more markets.

Charles sees stablecoin demand concentrating among smaller businesses. Large multinationals with sophisticated treasury operations often already have low-cost bank pricing and automated intercompany transfers. For those firms, the gains from stablecoins may not justify the added compliance work.

A small business making its first international supplier payment has none of those tools, and the advantage there is large. Charles also traced the customer shift. A new global neobank now defaults to stablecoin-first and global-first, while traditional fintech interest picked up after the GENIUS Act. Rain originally pitched itself as “Ramp for DAOs”. Five years on, Ramp itself is taking stablecoin accounts into conventional businesses.

Ramp is taking its stablecoin accounts to general availability rather than pilot, after a beta of 150 customers in non-crypto industries that included a farming business holding treasury in stablecoins and a church taking donations. Cuy separately pointed to towing companies and used-electronics retailers as a sign Ramp's base is moving past Silicon Valley. The strongest pull starts with global-first platforms and smaller businesses underserved by existing cross-border infrastructure. Sophisticated enterprises will adopt more selectively, where weekend settlement, corridor access or counterparty economics justify the compliance work.

Customers may never ask for stablecoins by name. Tuttle said they ask for faster onboarding, more transparency, cheaper money movement and better balance economics, and stablecoins are one way to deliver that. It answers the objection Cuy hears from banks, that none of their customers are asking for it.

The signal to watch is what happens after the customer taps. If a scaled incumbent moves issuer and network settlement onto stablecoins, the card becomes an interface to new settlement infrastructure. A program that continues converting to fiat before settlement can still expand stablecoin spending while leaving most card economics intact.

DIGIT moves beyond the digital-twin model used in many tokenisation projects. LSEG and HSBC have signed an MOU covering a bilateral digital securities depository link that will let investors hold and access HM Treasury’s digitally native gilt through either infrastructure. HSBC Orion is the platform selected for the pilot issuance and will act as the issuer DSD, while LSEG will act as the investor DSD. The first transaction is targeted by Q1 2027

What sets it apart is where the record sits. In the DTCC model the depository stays the legal record and the token is a digital twin. Here, as Simon put it to LSEG’s Darko Hajdukovic and he confirmed, the chain itself is the legal record, with settlement finality onchain under English law. It runs inside the Bank of England and FCA sandbox, where firms run live, real transactions under a temporary-permissions regime intended to become permanent.

Darko stressed that DIGIT is an HM Treasury instrument and remains subject to regulatory approval. The significance for treasuries is that this is directly issued government debt with legal finality onchain, rather than a claim on a tokeniser. That could draw in a different tier of institution and put 24/7 movement of government collateral within reach.

Augustus raised $180 million at a $1 billion valuation to build a clearing bank for international fintechs and banks, with Tiger Global leading the round. Its pitch is direct access to dollar accounts, Swift, ACH and stablecoin rails through one federally regulated institution, rather than another software layer sitting above sponsor banks. Tiger Global led. The OCC granted preliminary conditional approval on 8 May 2026, with final approval and opening still subject to the regulator's pre-opening requirements. The core platform, Marble, runs 24/7 settlement and API-first virtual accounts.

Augustus skips the consumer franchise most fintech challengers chase and goes after the wholesale transaction-banking business, the Citi transaction-services and JPMorgan payments layer. That is the harder, better-defended part of banking to enter, and a post-SVB, post-First Republic cohort of digitally-native banks, Erebor among them, is now aiming at it. Charles described the opportunity as starting "with first principles of what a bank in 2026 should look like, on stablecoin rails".

The execution test is compliance. Augustus can grow by serving institutions that incumbents find uneconomic, but it cannot confuse an underserved customer with unacceptable risk. Sanctions screening, fraud controls and correspondent due diligence will determine whether 24/7 infrastructure becomes a commercial advantage or a supervisory liability. On the show, the team’s former OCC and Green Dot experience was the reason for cautious optimism.

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